


entangle

by lizzieraindrops



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: F/M, Games Wizards Play spoilers, Gen, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Queerplatonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-13 21:10:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7137266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizzieraindrops/pseuds/lizzieraindrops
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dairine wants to talk to Roshaun about the emerald’s chain. A post-GWP fic. Originally posted <a href="http://lizzieraindrops.tumblr.com/post/145600987814/entangle-1856-words">on tumblr</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	entangle

The unearthly brilliant burnt-orange of a Wellakhit sunset trails a few more sunrays down the high walls of the ‘little’ sitting room. The darker color of the light is heavier than Dairine’s used to; like the star that is its source; like the planet on which she stands; like the glittering goldstone weight of the Sunplace’s palace walls. And yet, for the blessed, now-unaccustomed lightness in her chest, she might as well be hovering tiptoe in the one-sixth-of-Earth’s gravity of her own satellite Moon. Mildly nauseous elation and all.

The entire length of him is laid out on one of those plush, futonny Wellakhit lounging couches. The entire golden length of his hair is looped back and forth over the ornate scrolled armrest supporting him. (One of the first things he’d done, once Dairine had finished crushing him in a Lord-of-the-Rings extended edition hug, was complain about the pull of his overlong hair caught under his lanky Wellakhit ass.)

Nelaid had finally succeeded in coaxing her away from his side for a brief meal. Sustenance was incidental. Dairine was yielding more to Nelaid’s gentle insistence that Roshaun be allowed a few moments alone with Miril than to the barely-felt pangs of hunger. Her stomach, however, had its own agenda. Once she began eating, she found herself ravenous. The toll of the emotional exhaustion she’d racked up in the past twenty-four hours was now clamoring to be paid its dues. The high waters of her frenetic energy sank from neck-level to gut level as her relentless production of adrenaline dwindled and faltered.

“He will not fault you for resting,” Nelaid said quietly, when Dairine’s head started nodding forward over her pea-pod-shaped dish. She simply drew her slackened shoulders together again and lifted her head to look at him. His gaze was guarded but gentle. His full plate was almost untouched.

“I’ll sleep when you finish that plate,” Dairine said wryly. 

Nelaid gave a low chuckle. “Very well.” He picked up a greenish, berry-like fruit with his long fingers, popped it into his mouth, and chewed slowly.

Dairine smiled into her leafy red vegetables, and continued eating.

When she pauses in the doorway to that window-walled room, her energy rises again from its temporary trough to fizz at the level of her chest. He’s alone, propped up to something like sitting, but still taking up most of the length of that overblown futon. (It’s got little gems inset in the gold-plated feet, for crying out loud.) He’s watching her.

She crosses in front of the windows to go to him, throwing charcoal-and-citrine strips of sun and shadow across his face.

She stops just before the futon, standing with her feet close together. This is too formal, too far, but she doesn’t know where to put herself. She was sitting on the other end of the futon before, but that was  _before_  he woke up. Now, he’s looking at her, (he’s  _back,_  and he’s looking at her) and she’s terrified to broach that space without asking, as if the proximity of her not-quite-trembling self full to the throat with buzzing energy might cause him to flicker out of existence again -

He lifts a graceful hand to her, palm upraised. The new pale gold of his gaze is still locked with hers.

She cocks her head to the side a little, the ends of her short hair brushing her shoulder. Then, she lays her palm on top of his and grasps his hand gently.

 _I swear, if he tries any of that hand-kissing crap Penn’s so fond of, I_ **will** _hit him with a pillow again, and this time he’s getting a bloody nose_ , she thinks.

Roshaun laughs softly. Dairine freezes, immobilized, while stitches are ripped out of the newly-healed fibers of her heart. She hasn’t heard that understated, wry, accursedly dear sound for…. a year? Has it been?

 _It’s good to hear your thoughts, again, as violent as they may be_ , he thinks back at her.

Her suddenly tensed muscles relax a little. Dairine crinkles her nose and tries to make a face at him, but her cheeks want to smile too much to let her. 

 _I will, if you ever give me that kind of crap_ , she shoots back at him.

She can mentally feel his eyeroll building up before he actually executes it.  _ **Please**_. _Even if that were a Wellakhit custom as well as an Earth one, it seems in translation to be a gesture particularly unsuited to… us._

Dairine arches one brow. Her heartbeat stumbles, and her energy fizzles up to the level of her cheekbones. She couldn’t ask for a better opening.

She tugs at the collar of her Star Wars t-shirt with her free hand and pulls the emerald necklace out from under it. It’s reverted to its initial form, a simple, stunning cabochon emerald strung on a faintly glowing chain of close-written letters in the Speech, letters packed too closely to read. Her fist closes over the egg-shaped stone and she gently pulls at it, until the unbroken chain unclasps itself from around her neck. The ends of the phosphorescent strand trail slowly after the stone’s trajectory with the near-weightless twisting of waterborne kelp.

Roshaun watches what’s in her hand impassively.

“Do we want to talk about this?” Dairine says aloud. She actually does manage to sound nonchalant, but the effect is somewhat undermined by the minute tremors that he can undoubtedly feel through the contact of their hands. And by the fact that Roshaun is surely picking up her scattered thoughts and turmoil of emotions. This is so  _awkward_. This is somehow just as awkward as it would be if they really  _did_  care about each other in the particular way that everyone seemed to expect that they  _must_  -

“Wasn’t it you who said that there weren’t words for what we have?”

Dairine hefts the glowing filament protruding from either end of her fist. “I guess the right words found  _us_ , without having to be spoken.” The end of the two twined strands comprising the chain are slightly visible at one end, phasing faintly green-and-gold out of the blue-green wizardlight of their joined entanglement.

 _When did he become the most important person in my life?_  Dairine thinks to herself, bemused. So important that that importance is written into her very  _self_ , her very name as written truly in the Speech, with words she’d never encountered before she read them there in those softly shining letters. Words whose depth of meaning and precision of nuance are only approached in English by phrases she’d found coined in restless corners of the internet, describing the kind of intensity usually reserved for the bonds of lovers, but applied to - well; people like them.

Dairine lets go of his hand to pinch the end of the luminous chain between her fingers. She slides the fat, gleaming emerald off the end of the chain and drops it unceremoniously onto an ink-blue velvet cushion by Roshaun’s feet. Then, she uses her thumb and forefinger to smooth the coiled chain flat, untwisting it without tearing the parallel strands apart. It floats like gossamer in the air between her hands, looking for all the world like a green-and-gold diagram of the double-backbone of a DNA helix, flattened out for ease of viewing. It’s about two feet long in its current small font, but Dairine mutters a few words and then it’s big enough to read easily, spilling its wispy trailing end onto the floor.

Dairine looks back to Roshaun; then flicks her eyes away briefly; then locks her grey back with his gold, her jaw set.

“I’ve read yours, of course, when you were gone. But I,” she pauses to swallow the lump in her throat, making her voice embarrassingly thick. “I didn’t know if you’ve read mine. I don’t think they’re written out in full anywhere but here, and the Manual…”

“…would not make such detailed and personal information about another available except by explicit request and approval.”

“Right.” She assumes that means no, he hadn’t. Even so, he had to have noticed the changes to the non-public parts of his Name in the Speech, as she had: singletons of concepts that inevitably came in multiples; feelings and emotions that even in isolation implied a certain kind of reciprocity, like the complementary base pairs written into opposite sides of a strand of DNA.

She lifts the beginning of the sentence, the parallel long-written versions of their names, in her hands.

“D’you,” Dairine says, throat tight with vulnerability, but at the same time feeling utterly safe, “want to read it?”

Roshaun’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly in surprise, before he blinks slowly in acknowledgement. “I would be honored,” he says softly. Then he shifts his weight with some effort, and rearranges some of the many pillows he’s nested in to make room for Dairine to sit next to him on the wide cushion of the futon.

Dairine eyes the space and shoots him a wry grin. “Remember, I  _will_  give you a nosebleed, invalid or not.”

“Oh, I am aware,” he says dryly. “Nonetheless…” he gestures to the space, a question; an invitation. “Just have a seat.”

“ _’Just’_?” Dairine eyebrows fly up. Her mouth twists in amusement.  _Pretty sure we’ve already established how poor a modifier that is._

Roshaun simply gives her an unimpressed look.

Dairine rolls her eyes, but sits down. She trusts him completely not to make this into something it’s not. He’s not  _Penn_ , for crying out loud. He’s Roshaun, he’s back, he’s  _here_ , and he’s… hers. In that strange way that is entirely their own.

She shrugs off a shiver of emotion, and leans sideways against him, stretching her own short legs out alongside his ridiculously long ones. She can feel the rise and fall of his ribs breathing against hers.

 _Is this alright?_  he asks her silently. His mental voice is laced with the hesitancy of concern, perhaps misreading her tremor as discomfort.

 _ **Yes**_ , she says emphatically. She ignores the blurriness of her eyes, the sniffle filling her nose, and nestles a little closer to him. Her head falls against his shoulder, and she feels the weight of his come to rest against her crown. She can’t believe, after all this time, that he’s really, really back, close enough to touch like this. They’ve never been particularly tactile with each other, but in this moment, this is what she wants and needs. And from the warmth of his thoughts brushing against her mind, it’s the same for him.

She hefts the ribbon of light trailing onto the richly carpeted floor, and passes the end of it into his hands.

 _Let’s start here_ , she says.

 

***

 

Hours later, perhaps, in the dimness of after-dusk, she wakes in the exact same spot she unintentionally fell asleep. He’s still right there beside her, breathing slowly in and out against her with the slow rhythm of near unconsciousness. Outside the wide windows, stars are glinting fiercely in strange-familiar constellations, unimpeded by light pollution over the velvet darkness of the planet’s slag side. Dairine smiles to herself, and closes her eyes once again.


End file.
